Discussion Enhancing Occupational Rehabilitation in High-Stress Work: How Recovery Experience Reduces Dysfunctional Attitudes Through Emotional Regulation

Background: Surveying and mapping personnel operate in high-demand, precision-driven environments characterized by chronic occupational stress, posing significant risks to cognitive health and work functioning. Dysfunctional attitudes—rigid, perfectionistic cognitive schemas—constitute a key vulnerability factor for depression, anxiety, and impaired occupational adaptation in this population. Prior research has primarily described stressors rather than explained how daily psychological recovery mitigates such maladaptive cognition, a gap with direct implications for occupational rehabilitation. To bridge this divide between macro-stress descriptions and micro-cognitive mechanisms, this study introduces an integrative theoretical perspective that links organizational psychology (recovery theory) with clinical cognitive vulnerability models. To address this, a chain mediation model was tested to examine whether and how recovery experience influences dysfunctional attitudes through regulatory emotional self-efficacy and anxiety sensitivity. Methods: A sample of 107 field surveying personnel completed questionnaires assessing recovery experience (REQ), dysfunctional attitudes (DAS), regulatory emotional self-efficacy (RESE), and anxiety sensitivity (ASI-3). Data were analyzed using correlation analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) to test direct and mediating effects, with bootstrap confidence intervals calculated for indirect effects. Results: SEM indicated that: (1) recovery experience directly and negatively predicted dysfunctional attitudes; (2) regulatory emotional self-efficacy partially mediated this relationship; (3) anxiety sensitivity also partially mediated the relationship; and (4) regulatory emotional self-efficacy and anxiety sensitivity sequentially mediated the link between recovery experience and dysfunctional attitudes via a chain pathway. Bootstrap analyses confirmed the robustness of these indirect effects. Conclusion: This study provides an integrative framework connecting organizational psychology (recovery theory) with clinical psychology (cognitive vulnerability models) and occupational rehabilitation, systematically revealing the mechanism from external resource replenishment to internal cognitive schema improvement. Critically, it elucidates a sequential psychological pathway—from resource recovery, through enhanced emotion-regulation belief, to reduced catastrophic anxiety appraisal, and finally to attenuated dysfunctional cognition—that offers novel multi-level intervention targets for occupational rehabilitation. The findings highlight that interventions aimed at enhancing recovery quality, fostering emotional regulation beliefs, and correcting catastrophic interpretations of anxiety can help prevent and alleviate dysfunctional attitudes, thereby boosting individual psychological resilience and occupational functioning. These findings suggest integrated interventions for occupational rehabilitation programs targeting recovery, emotion regulation, and anxiety sensitivity.